


Summoners on the cliff

by laughingpineapple



Category: Final Fantasy X
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon, Rikku outsider pov, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-13
Updated: 2019-02-13
Packaged: 2019-10-20 00:34:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17612063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingpineapple/pseuds/laughingpineapple
Summary: Yuna sat beside him and he was real and human and her equal





	Summoners on the cliff

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wingsyouburn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wingsyouburn/gifts).



When they first touched land on Besaid again and felt the warm sand under their feet after the fall, after the losses, after Spira was free, Yuna went missing.

 

Lulu and Wakka shared their thoughts on the matter in silence, needing nothing more than a glance and a private smile as they let the sun and the brine of home fill the space between them; Kimahri grunted in agreement. 

“What?” asked Rikku. 

Lulu's smile grew fonder. 

“What?” Rikku asked again.  _ Her _ home was far away. She knew many of its secrets, not these foreign shores’.

 

“Summoner on the cliff,” they told her, eventually, with a shrug, and Lulu turned around to look at the line of trees up above. “About time.” “Yuna back by nightfall.” “Let her be, ya?” “She will tell us what she wants to tell us, when she wants to.” 

 

Rikku cocked her head at this display of collected wisdom, well-meaning for sure, and sensible too, no doubt, and loving, but of no more use to her than the trumpeting of a shoopuf's snout. She waved goodbye to the trio, to Pops and Brother farther back on the beach, and turned her back to the sea.

 

The thick underbrush of Besaid's woods soon closed in around her. The paths were wide and clear, marked by dashes of paint on rocks and bark, but as they climbed closer to the promontory they split off into a maze of crossroads that covered the mountainside like a web. With no signs and no map, Rikku could only trust her instincts, her bond with her cousin and, with some luck, that wistful look Lulu had shot earlier, aimed someplace far up and to the East. “Summoner on the cliff”, they had said, but there were no summoners on Spira anymore, not even hidden among faraway palms and ferns. Not even Yunie. Still, the island's most prominent cliff, she believed, was to her right and at least half an hour away.

 

An hour later, a parched throat put an end to a long string of Al Bhed profanities and approximations thereof, with frequent refrains aimed at Yevon's smelly feet. Abandoned by the comforting sound of her own voice, Rikku sighed and leaned against a rock, letting the sounds of the woods surround her. The whistling of a breeze. Birds, calling each other among the branches. The crystalline splashing of thin waterfalls down below. Nearby, faint words, human words, Yuna's words. Rikku perked up.

 

“We have all paid our prices,” her cousin said from beyond the trees, and if her words echoed the speech she gave from the Grand Maester's seat her voice did not, it stayed private, personal. “Mine… I mean… how long did you keep your smile? How long is it fair to keep our smile? How much of it was ours? What part of it isn't ours, but Yevon's, I will leave behind and hear nothing of it anymore. I think you agree?” 

 

Rikku followed the voice into the trees away from the winding trails, hearing it so close now in front of her, separated only by a veil of leaves.

“Because I know... that it wasn't all Yevon's. I know the warmth wasn't.”

Past the last fern, the view took Rikku's breath away. A glade opened on a small sunlit basin by the southern cliff, protected by a thick grove and by boulders on the other side. Water pooled on the rocks, one of Besaid's many springs, clear and sparkling in the late afternoon sun. Uncle Braska sat beside it, splashing his feet like a man who hadn't been dead for ten years and didn't have a care in the world, either. He wore his robes loose, chestplate unbuckled, ribbons undone, and had left his heavy headpiece behind, freeing soft brown hair to be caressed by the wind. The holy man (the kind man, the friend of Al Bhed - too friendly, as Pops would have it, but then again, Pops said many stupid things) was massaging his sore neck muscles with a sheepish smile.

 

Yuna sat by his side, almost daring to lean on his shoulder, to bask in his contented grace, and talked to him, frank, relieved, understood. She told him of the first time she wove a rope, of a plaque in Bevelle, of the finest points of boiling an egg and it sounded like there was some shared history there that remained safe between them. Small talks, small steps dancing around the words that gripped her throat.

 

“I missed you…” she said, eventually, and he splashed his feet some more. “I missed you so much that I couldn't come here. I couldn't afford to be reminded that you were so much more than the hymns and the statues, father. I wanted to, so badly. But I couldn't. The void you left… I had to let it grow smaller. It would be the void I was going to leave in turn, as I followed in your footsteps, and I had to believe that Lulu and the others would… you know.”

 

Rikku wished she could hug her then. Hug them both, maybe, in that strange moment out of time which she didn’t want to make sense of. A fair, solid hug. But summoners never got fairness, did they. Not even when they weren't summoners anymore. Not even when they were dead. Braska didn't hug his daughter, but he looked down like he understood her pain and all the world's pain and said, softly: “I know.”

 

Startled, Yuna looked at him. She shook her head with a little smile and sat in silence for a while, brightened by his warmth.

 

“There is one more thing… then I will tell you again about the chocobos sculptures we made with the sand, I would like very much to tell you about the chocobos. But I need to be honest, with you and with myself, so I will tell you this when I have never told it to anyone on the island. Not even to Lulu, who knows everything. I never came here, father, because I could not stand to find out how you really were. Not only to remember your love from when I was a child, but to meet you again eye to eye, as my own person, and… find out that you were so much more... more kind, more bright, more human than I could ever hope to be. But now… Sin is gone and… we're not so bad, are we? We can sit together like this. I can tell you about places you never saw and people you never met. We made it. Can you believe it? We made it.”

 

In that moment he turned to look at Yuna with his kindest smile and faded for a moment in a burst of pyreflies. Rikku blinked. Enthralled by the apparition and by the sun's reflections, she hadn't registered that the small basin was filled with pyreflies, like a chest holding a precious memory. One day, ten years earlier, Braska had stopped there. Rested there. Smiled at his guardians or at a new friend. His pilgrimage had urged him on, but a trace of him had remained in the basin, a summoner on the cliff watching over the island he had come to love. 

 

So Lulu was right (big whoop, she always was): this moment was for Yuna alone, no matter how much restraint it took Rikku to keep her peace. If she ever felt like getting to know her uncle a little better, she would wait for her turn, another day, another year. Anyway, Besaid’s treasured apparition was just memories, after all, a record stuck in a loop - not the Al Bhed's way. She would rather ask Pops and Yuna and try to make sense of the man behind their words.

And yet. As she turned around to begin her hike down toward the village, the memory of Braska's words gave her pause. Coincidence, surely. Lucky timing in the pyreflies’ recording, a soft understanding uttered a lifetime ago to different people coming back at just the right time. Her upbringing allowed no other explanation. And yet. She walked down with a spring in her step, feeling loved. Feeling that Yuna was loved, always.


End file.
